Ever since the formation of the global network of interconnected computing devices such as the Internet, there is being a huge emerging of various communication formats enabling these computing devices to communicate among themselves. This has created various services for users in business and non-business areas. In later half of 1990's we saw the boom of the Internet. A whole set of new services and content became available to the consumers during a short, revolutionary and hype intense period. That period introduced e-commerce, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Portals, eyeballs game, dotcom companies and even the new economy.
However, many of the computing devices such as interconnected computers, servers and routers were originally designed for traditional packet based transmission, where association with real time event typically lacked. An example of such a communication is the web pages and web surfing. Also many trusted application such as banking could be taken care with possible delays. Even some of the fastest data communication ways such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) were designed, despite of the ultimate data transfer speed, to quite delay tolerant environments. Lately the telecommunication industry has been highly focused on their leap towards using IP for telecommunication services.
However, these devices carry the heritage of delay tolerant based data communication. Consequently, there are still some remains of the elements and design in these devices, which will inevitably result in slowness of data processing in system level and delays in data communication. One example is the principal design for applications substantially based on non real time or alternatively expressed as delay tolerance.
Examples of such approaches have been presented in a system for a switch-over process depicted in FIG. 1. Typically the need for the switch-over is communicated via microprocessors. When a working connection (W) becomes faulty, an interrupt request is given to a microprocessor (CPU). After receiving the interrupt request, the CPU on the working side unit signals the CPU on the protection side unit, which then switches the traffic of the connection to a protecting connection (P). The system of FIG. 1 may have some configurable integrated circuit (IC) such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) but not for the switch-over process, and the CPU's presence is crucial.
A disadvantage of the traditional switch-over based on CPU's communication is a slowness of the process. This is especially problematic with a large amount of connections, when the CPU has to handle a large number of interrupt requests. Therefore, the solutions are not adequate for any communication or connections requiring real time functionality. Moreover, the switch-over time is not fast enough with substantially real-time based connections, where a switch-over is typically required in less than 50 ms.
In view of various inherent limitations of communication and systems between computing devices, it would be desirable to avoid or mitigate these and other problems associated with prior art. Thus, there is a need to have a switch-over functionality for real time application.